Cathy Yan’s ‘The Gallerist’ is fun, satirical, and strangely compromised

Of the recent filmmakers to emerge from the Sundance pipeline, Cathy Yan probably has the most amusingly varied repertoire. Raised between Virginia and Hong Kong, her China-set debut Dead Pigs—which premiered at the Park City festival in 2018, but wouldn’t release until 2021—is a wonderfully ambient social film. In the interim, she was picked by Warner Bros. to helm their stylish (but scattered) superhero spinoff Birds of Prey in 2020, after which she directed an episode of HBO’s acclaimed billionaire dramedy Succession, a show of kinetic voyeurism. Her latest film, the Weekend at Bernie’s-esque The Gallerist, takes her back to her indie roots (albeit with some big names at her disposal), and makes for yet another wild swing in a different direction.

Set on the eve of Art Basel Miami, The Gallerist finds struggling curator Polina Polinski (producer Natalie Portman) in a pickle and then some, when a workplace accident forces her to pass off a dead body as a nouveau sculpture. The resultant farce, while set in the art world at large, is a work of naked symbolism that feels more about studio filmmaking and Yan’s own experiences, than fine art galleries and opulent collections. Although it takes a while to get going, it ultimately ends up pretty fun, but it can’t help but play like exactly the kind of compromised product the film is about in the first place. Perhaps Yan, on some level, saw this coming.

Although populated by caricatures, The Gallerist is made amusingly human by its sensational cast. Portman, with her blond bob and twirling hand gestures, plays the broad idea of a fancy conservator, a woman tasked with finding and molding underrepresented artists while balancing a hefty checkbook. Her anxious assistant Kiki (Jenna Ortega) is keen to make her mark, but feels unheard, especially when Polina ignores her warnings about an air conditioner dripping water near a sculpture of enlarged bull castration shears. Quickly and efficiently, the film portends its oncoming comic tragedy by having the installation’s sharp points protrude throughout the frame. When contentious, self-important art influencer Dalton Hardberry (Zach Galifianakis) demands a private tour of the gallery, the outcome of his accidental demise is all but pre-ordained, but it’s no less engrossing in the buildup. A slip and a skewering later, and Polina and Kiki are forced into the uncomfortable position of getting away with murder, so to speak.  

Although The Gallerist wastes no time establishing its premise, it has an initial awkwardness thanks to some askew construction, which makes it hard to get on board with. For nearly a third of its scant 88 minutes, it seems to have little grasp on its use of space, and thus, its characters’ physical dynamics in moments of urgency. Polina’s gallery, with its pristine white walls, plays host to the entire film and presents the challenge of creating both depth and defining features, which the movie’s rote dialogue coverage ends up obscuring. Perhaps it’s an overly technical note, but in a film about fine-tuned artistry, the movie starts out as anything but precise. Its framing and editing have a bizarre, unpolished quality at first, framing characters without much emphasis, and cutting away from Portman during reactions and punchlines that might have better served her frayed performance. Then again, Ortega as an art world up-and-comer forever on the verge of puking is funny in its own way too, and the duo retreating to a fancy, out-of-service restroom to conspire multiple times is a functional-enough running gag.

However, The Gallerist picks up steam when the scheme finally gets moving full swing, and the camera shakes off its constraints. As other characters enter the fray and are roped into the conspiracy—from the sculpture’s original artist, the newcomer Stella Burgess (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), to Kiki’s aunt and fearsome art dealer Marianne Gorman (Catherine Zeta Jones)—the movie’s aesthetic language completely transforms. Lengthy takes that snake through the gallery and around its walls become Yan’s visual lingua franca, as she hands off subplots between characters without cutting away (finally providing much-needed spatial clarity too). It takes the form of a slick heist caper in which the objective is in plain sight, and the crew must play their designated parts as if nothing were the matter, culminating in—of all things—an auction scene with the energy of a rap battle.

As the public pours in to get a look at Stella’s allegedly hyper-realistic work, and other major stars show up in lively supporting parts, the movie charges breathlessly forward, as the camera remains tethered to Polina, Kiki, Stella and Marianne for lengthy periods, allowing us into their bizarre mindsets. It’s during these unbroken stretches that the movie’s raison d'etre starts to materialize. By focusing on the character’s faces, the film has little time for the other artworks adorning the gallery’s walls, even though they’re mentioned more than once. It has little actual interest in art itself, which—despite the perplexing nature of its setting—can also be seen as a refreshing change from most gallery spoofs. (How many times have you seen unsuspecting viewers huddled around a trashcan after mistaking it for a modern art piece?) This is because the satire in The Gallerist is, for better or worse, both cynical and deceptively simple: regardless of what the art is, or what its meaning may be, what ultimately drives each and every character is money.

The characters could come clean about the body, sure, but that might get in the way of their next big paycheck. The world to which they’ve tethered themselves cannot exist without capital, and there are moments during which you can practically see the dollar signs shimmering in their eyes—including the seemingly altruistic Stella. One exchange in particular leads to her confessing that while she could make pure art that receives less recognition, this may not be enough for her. It certainly isn’t enough for the other three women, who keep justifying their harebrained ploy by using the language of corporate female empowerment, nudging The Gallerist in the direction of a “girl boss” send-up, right down to a slow motion shot of a victorious power strut that’s swiftly interrupted.

On some level, they represent the studio suits who would have likely controlled Yan’s own previous output, in the famously filmmaker-unfriendly superhero genre. And yet, Yan doesn’t divorce herself from the allure of rising through the Hollywood ranks. If she had, Stella might have taken the form of some pure, perhaps naïve creator whose vision was corrupted purely by outside forces. That Stella agrees to Polina’s rigmarole makes her just as complicit in bastardizing her own work to make a quick buck.

However, as lucid as these themes may be, they’re occasionally stifled by clumsy moments that bring The Gallerist itself into question, as a work that may have been interfered with. A strange sequence early on sees Polina reacting to some unseen images and muffed sounds in front of a bathroom mirror, in a scene ripped straight from Horror 101. And yet, instead of revealing some ghostly presence (perhaps that of the slain influencer, whose taunts still ring in her ears), the movie continues as usual, as though nothing were amiss. Were this just one fleeting instance of uneven assembly, it could be chalked up to an accidental gesture, but after Dalton’s death, the camera becomes imbued with spectral qualities, charging through walls and tilting on its axis, as if consumed by spiritual agony. Combined with Galifianakis’ extremely brief appearance, it’s hard not to wonder if The Gallerist might have once contained some supernatural element that was, at some point, unceremoniously snipped. The camera’s haunting rhythms certainly grant the film momentum, but they don’t exactly feel motivated.  

There’s also an oddly over-emphasized line of dialogue, delivered by Jones in the final act, that feels like the movie’s big Death of a Salesman moment, in which she utters a unique phrase—practically down the lens—that feels like it was once meant to be the movie’s title. (This moniker was also rumored in the press). Ultimately, what the movie is called doesn’t matter, but there are impressions at every turn of something else The Gallerist might have been, in some alternate universe. For much of the runtime, a different movie threatens to push through the edges of the screen—a movie that wasn’t just entertaining, the way this one certainly is, but was more thematically coherent too, and had more to say about the depths of its characters’ ethical concessions.

In an act of art imitating life, The Gallerist is practically a reflection of its own existence—a mise en abyme of Yan’s creative frustrations, papered over by a clockwork romp. It’s a good time nonetheless, and while it’s hard not to shake the feeling that it could’ve been a great time, the fact that it so perfectly encapsulates the possible rationales for its own compromises, even unintentionally, is nothing if not fitting.